Tap, tap, tap….is anyone out there?

A lot has been happening around here! That tends to happen after more than a year of silence. I won’t try to catch you up on everything, though, that would take way too long.

Recently, there has been a lot of action on the knitting front. Last week (Apr 11-14) I was lucky enough to get a Mom-cation to Atlanta for the Stitches South conference! Even better, I got to meet up with my dear friend from Ravelry, Hypercycloid! This was the first time the two of us have gotten to hang out in “real life”, but it will certainly not be the last! We had an amazing time!

I flew in on Thursday morning, and headed out to the conference center to help out Miss Babs with her booth set-up. It was such a treat to fondle all of the yarn before anyone else got a chance to see it. I should’ve snapped up a few more skeins while I was doing it, though, because apparently everyone else at the show liked the same colors I did and my favorites were gone by the end of the weekend. I did get two skeins, though, that I am totally in love with. I got a Yowza! in her Peacock colorway and a Yummy 2-ply in Groovy. Clearly I was attracted to the same family of colors that day because upon further examination, they are nearly the same, but that’s okay, I’m going to have a great time knitting them up!

After the Market preview opened, I headed out to the airport to pick up Hypercylcoid. The weather was starting to get pretty nasty, but fortunately her flight still got in nearly on time. Unfortunately, the weather caused a few accidents on the interstate, so it took quite a while for us to get back to the hotel. I must admit to a few nerves about our first meeting, would we get along as well in person as we did on-line? Silly of me to worry, we never ran out of subjects to talk about and I don’t think there was a single awkward silence all weekend!

The rest of the weekend flew by with Market visits, a few classes and some really great dinners! Of the classes, I think my favorite was deliberate pooling with hand dyed yarns taught by Laura Bryant. It was an all-day class and I was a little concerned about getting bored. I should not have worried, the class was fascinating! And there was math! (I’m a nerd, I love math!) We also took a class with Lily Chen about join-as-you-go knitting. I enjoyed the content of the class, but her teaching style didn’t really appeal to me. The last class we took was short-row knitting, but the technique was being applied in more of a free-form way and wasn’t as interesting to me. Also, I discovered during the class that I had lost my cell phone, so I will admit to being very distracted!

On the eating side of things (after all, it’s in the name of the blog), we had some fantastic meals! On Friday night, we hit the South City Kitchen in Vinings. Oh. My. God. was it ever good! We shared two appetizers, fried green tomatoes with goat cheese and bar-be-que pork on a hoe cake. Both phenomenal! For dinner we both got the fried chicken. Now, I’m a southern girl and I’ve eaten a lot of fried chicken in my life. This may possibly be the BEST fried chicken I’ve ever eaten in my life! We both stuffed ourselves. To the point that we couldn’t even order dessert. And we both have huge sweet tooths (sweet teeth?).

Saturday night, we joined about 80 other knitters at Scalini’s. A woman who used to be a dyer (and is now a nurse) has been hosting a dinner there for a few years because it’s right near the convention and her father owns it. Pretty darn good Italian food and even better company. We shared a table with Babs and Jen (from Miss Babs yarn), Kate from Dragonfly Fibers and her crew, and the gang from Cephalopod Yarns. We had such a great time and laughed until it hurt! Then we headed back to the hotel to meet a group of Slytherins from the HPKCHC. More laughs ensued!

I’m still in a bit of a happy glow, more than a week later, from all the fun I had at Stitches. I was a good girl and did not add too much to my already enormous stash, just a few select skeins from Babs and Dragonfly (and one other dyer because they had Sparkles!).

On another knitting front, the day after I got home from Atlanta, I opened up the registration for Tour-de-Sock 2013! We are going to have such a great tour this year! We’ve already got more than half the number of Racers signed up this year than we did last year, and we’ve still got a month of registration left to go. Lots of new faces and plenty of new ones as well. I’m really hoping to double the donation we were able to make last year to Doctors without Borders. I’ve got an amazing slate of designers on board for this year’s event so I think everyone will be very happy in the end.

The Love portion of this blog is easy. Bean (DD 6yo) and Potato (DS 2yo) are doing great! They are getting so big! Bean is in Kindergarten and it has thrilled me this year watching her learn to read and do basic math! So far she seems to love learning and I hope that she continues to enjoy school as much as I did. Potato is in pre-school. I was not going to send him so early, but he wasn’t speaking much and I thought it would be good for him. The past month has been explosive development in his verbal skills and he treated me just this morning to his first FIVE WORD sentence. He told me “I want more ‘an’ peez.” “An” is his word for “banana”. It really blew me away!

Hubby is also doing well. Work is keeping him super-busy, but he’s been really focused on spending time at home with us as well. He gave me an amazing present for my birthday this year, a kitchen renovation, that will kick off in the next few weeks. I’m sure I’ll be venting a lot on here about it this summer! I really want the kitchen, but I know the process of getting it will be ‘challenging’! Oh, and since we decided to add in new floors for the whole downstairs, a new bar and downstairs bath while we were at it, things are going to be even more exciting! Oh, and we have to rip out a load-bearing wall in the kitchen! Fun stuff, huh? I’ll put up some before pics soon and track the progress as we go. Anyhow, hubby has racked up some pretty serious brownie points on this one!

Okay, I’m going to sign off for right now. I need to get back to work on some accounting stuff for Tour-de-Sock and Sock Sniper!